Gravatar-Powered Profiles

We’ve always sort-of had profiles here on WordPress.com — you probably remember giving your name and such when you first signed up for WordPress.com — but they’ve always been a little lame. You’d see your information when you wrote comments, or with some themes, or on the forums. Such basic functionality worked, but you guys have been asking for richer profiles that showed a bit more personality and were as easy and ubiquitous as your Gravatar.

What if your Gravatar wasn’t just an image that showed up when you comment, but you could attach more of yourself to it to better represent your style, flair, and personality not just with more photos but with links to all the cool stuff you’re doing around the web.

That’s what Gravatar profiles are, and they’re now live to the world and easy to edit right inside your dashboard.

We’re continuing the tradition of complete openness and transparency that Gravatar (and WordPress) has been known for, so nothing you put into your profile will be locked behind proprietary APIs or a scary terms of service — what you choose to share in your profile will be open to the world.

You’ll find some cool features on the new profiles: you can have a gallery of your favorite photos, add a variety of contact methods, and link your other profiles. Every linked account is verified so you know it’s not an impostor, and we also might be able to do cool stuff in the future like aggregate your content or update your avatar in multiple places when you update Gravatar.

While we’re all getting familiar with this new system, you will only be able to view your own profile on Gravatar.com, so you’ll have a bit of time to spruce it up before we’re out of beta. Check out this handsome fellow:

Sample profile on Gravatar.com

To edit your profile on WordPress.com just click this link. From there you can edit all of your information to build out your profile. Some of the links will go through to Gravatar.com, since that is the engine behind all of this, and you can also go edit it on Gravatar.com instead, it’s the same thing.

Edit your Public Profile

Personal settings and options now have their own page in the “Personal Settings” sidebar menu under “Users” in your dashboard.

Profiles will become public for everyone soon so make sure to check yours out and update it to include (or leave out) exactly what you want. If you remove all information from your profile, then other people will only be able to see your Gravatar, just like right now.

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I have just tried to update my profile page, to my astonishment it could not update the information filled by me there. Only last option which was Verified External Services could be updated. I am feeling like give no more try to it.

You can moderate this comment also like the last time unnecessarily, made on server down post here. I am surprised by WordPress second time in my almost 1 and a half year interaction with it. Personally I consider WordPress a model, which can do no wrong.

And no spam protection on e-mail addresses… and adding websites is booby trapped with an extra “http://” which you can’t see but which magically appears as soon as you paste something into the box, but you don’t see that because the caret is at the end of what you’ve pasted… and there’s no edit of what’s already there.

This feature will be really ace, but it needs a little bit of polish doesn’t it.

While this feature may be fine for many of your customers, I would hasten to point out that in volatile political times such as we’re going through now, it might be advisable for those of us involved in politically oriented blogs to release as little about ourselves as possible. There are extremists on both sides of the political picture and the last thing I want someone whose politics is 180 degrees from mine, is for that person to know how to get in touch with me and what I look like. Especially when I have no idea what he or she looks like. Thanks, but that’s one advantage I prefer not to give up. That’s an invitation to disaster.

I would go a step further. If you’re blogging in a politically sensitive area where what you say could have an effect on your safety, check out the Global Voices organization. They have some excellent information about how to protect yourself:

We’re looking at possibly allowing multiple entries for each type of information in the future, but for now we wanted to just see how people were going to use this thing :) Lots of cool things to come!

I gave up trying to obscure my email address a few years ago. Once the spammers have it, they have it. And they appear to get it no matter how much you try to hide it. I now focus on stopping it once it gets to my account so it never shows up in my inbox. Gmail gets better at this every day, and I use SpamAssassin.

according to @gerry ashley i’m not fully happy with that kind of features. maybe most of us/you love spreading personal details around the web – i don’t. the more ‘linking to’-platforms develops, the more i have to take care of and to look after. i’m really dreaming of one single application that allows to control all my connections (sort of one-for-all remote control), but this will have to stay a dream, i presume. :(

The new profiles feature definitely doesn’t *require* you to spread anything around, you’re more than welcome to keep everything here at WordPress.com! If you do have other content or information that you’re publishing around the place though, then adding them to your profile will help other folks to find them.

I like this! But, my gravatar image is pretty low res because for a gravatar it doesn’t need to be big. But, then when it posts on the profile page it’s enlarged to the point of pixellation. Any way to change the size that displays or assign an image other than the actual gravatar to be the large paper-clipped one on the profile page?

If you upload a higher resolution version for your gravatar, it will be automatically resized to whichever size is needed, based on the original. That way if it’s displayed in a large format, it’ll be nice and crisp, but it will also be resized to be a nice small file when shown smaller.

Hi: I do have a question which I hope isn’t inappropriate. A few years ago, I published several web-sites through a different web-host. My contact info was included on my sites. Over time, I actually received many thousands of internet-attacks through my e-mail account. Has your technology made this former threat null and irrelevant? I hope so. Is it reasonably safe to include my e-mail address in my profile?

Although it’s not currently, when profiles are made public, your email address will be obscured via javascript, making it much more difficult for spammers to harvest it programmatically. That being said, if you’re concerned about “someone” getting your email by putting it on your profile, then just leave it off, as that’s always the best way to make sure it stays private!

We don’t have a specific date yet, we want to give as many people as possible a chance to change their details before things are made public, because we’re very aware that a lot of folks don’t want even their real name being published. Once it looks like the majority of people have made any changes they wanted to make, we’ll open things up.

You already have a short URL, based on your username. For example, mine is http://gravatar.com/beau. For now you are the only one who can access your URL though. Once profiles are public, these will be included on your Edit Profile page so that you can easily copy-paste it, send it to friends etc.

You need a bigger warning of this, I just saw a little note once that was replaced with some other announcement when I paged back to read it again, then it took a while to find this out.

> we’re very aware that a lot of folks don’t want even their real name being published.
Good so far.
> Once it looks like the majority of people have made any changes they wanted to make, we’ll open things up.

Wrong. This is very wrong. You should _invite_ people to _opt_in_ to having their personal information published.

Don’t do it to everybody as soon as it “looks like a majority” has noticed it’s going to happen.

Always: default to “opt in” not “opt out” and especially “opt out after we surprise you.”

Please. It’s a big world.

Lots of your customers might be put at risk if you make their personal information public without their specific OK.

WordPress isn’t alone in this – but why do you want Gravatar to “upload, edit and replace photos” on Flickr? It seems to me to be an unnecessary security hole – external services should only have access to the minimum set of functions.

I’ve tried the feature and I can honestly say that I hate it! It takes forever for the Gravatar page to load and it keeps trying to close done my window. I prefer the old, easier profiles. I feel sad to see them go, for this! :cry:
~Stacy

It would be great if we could rearrange the order item appear, for instance, which picture shows up first or which website is listed first. Right now to change them you basically have to delete it and then re-add them in the order you want. Otherwise, great work, and I can’t wait to see the future of WordPress/Gravatar/Automattic as a social network that spans across multiple independent sites :)

I loved this idea so much in 2008 I started a blog about it. I didn’t keep up with the blog because I felt as though I’d exhausted the topic after a few short posts detailing a hypothetical scenario of establishing social connections between consumers and producers of online content.

Great WordPress news. I do love more personalized G. Great feature to show the world that we are exist and easier for someone out there to see us as a unique blogger. I can’t wait for aggregate feature coming.